Overview of Elementary Sessions

Tuesday, August 12, 2014Special Plenary Sessions

10:30 - 12:00 P.M.

Sister Act No More: Teaching in a 21st Century Catholic School Teaching in a Catholic school is a uniquely rewarding, yet challenging experience. The climate and culture of a Catholic education is distinctive, but lack of resources and specialized personnel can make the already difficult job even more demanding. This session is designed for Catholic educators to receive resources and ideas in several areas, which your school may or may not already have. We will discuss some of the joys and challenges of teaching in a Catholic school. Other topics discussed will be special education and Individual Education Plans, English Language Learners, overcoming different ideas of best practice within the staff, teaching the sacraments, how to afford to stay in a Catholic school, being an effective teacher with limited resources, and how to weave faith and religion into your classroom culture. Shelly Janowski & Rachel Rumely, Saint Columbkille Partnership SchoolLocation: Fulton Hall 245

@Networking: Building a Professional Learning Network Using Social MediaThe first years as a teacher are the hardest...followed closely by...harder years with different challenges! As teachers, we face daily, weekly, monthly and yearly challenges but don’t always have the time or opportunity to connect with colleagues for collaboration, networking, and personal growth. This session will focus on the marriage of social media and personal learning networks (PLNs) that extend your learning interests out to other like-minded individuals. Learn how to use social media professionally, build connections to a learning community, and avoid the pitfalls of social media mistakes that can affect your career in education. In this session, we will focus on two specific web 2.0 tools: Facebook and Twitter. We will discuss the basics of each for professional use, how to separate your professional from your personal use, and how to build a professional learning community that serves as a model for professional growth and responsible social media use for students. The novice, the occasional and the regular user will benefit from this session! #seeyouthere!Elizabeth Stringer Keefe, Boston College & Lesley University's Graduate School of EducationLocation: Fulton Hall 250

Wednesday, August 13, 2014Breakout Session A

9:15 - 10:35 A.M.

A1. Go Slow to Fast: Driving the First Weeks of School The beginning of the school year can be overwhelming and exciting all at the same time! There is so much to do but you are not sure how to make it all work. Take a deep breath and do not worry! In this honest session, I will give you tips from 18 years of teaching. We will cover the physical space, organizational techniques, schedule, routines, and activities to jumpstart your year. In addition, we will discuss how to build classroom community and connect with families. We will spend time discussing materials and activities that you can use within the first six weeks. We will cover what you need to know to have a successful start to the school year. Nicole Brandl, Brookline Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 115

A2. Fostering Safe & Healthy Classrooms and School Environments No teacher ever plans or expects to have an unsafe or unhealthy classroom. However, what do you do when off the cuff, a student busts out with, "That's so Gay" when responding to something he does not like or agree with? What do you say when you address the language and the reply is, "Well, that's not how I mean it"? This session we will explore the damaging effects of anti LGBT bullying and bias in the classroom and highlight ways to introduce and include LGBT topics into the classroom and curriculum that affirm the diversity of all students in the classroom. We will explore ways that you can become an ally in fostering the healthy and safe school environments. Frank Pantano, Boston Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 145A3. Writing Through LiteracyCome to this session to take a look at writing in connection with literacy. We will take a look at the new Common Core expectations, rubrics that can help to inform and assess student work, and how to incorporate meaningful written responses to what students are reading both with fiction and informational text. Writing is such an important form of communication within the curriculum, lets start with literacy! Amanda DeForest, Newton Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 135

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2014BREAKOUT SESSION B

10:45 - 12:05 P.M.

B1. Tips on Building & Maintaining Communication with Families for Urban Elementary School Teachers You're hired, you have your classroom check list growing, and curriculum is in the works: you may be thinking, “How will I connect with parents? How will I keep families updated on new units of study, field trips, behavior issues, homework accountability, and student highlights?” Come to this session where you will learn about different ways to build and maintain home and school communication! Whether you will have a few students or teaching multiple classes, come to brainstorm and receive practical examples you can use in your classroom and learn how to keep these details organized so they’re not overwhelming. After having gone through my first year of teaching this past year, I can give you some tips from my experience and colleagues that have helped to keep a good rapport with parents and families to help them feel included in the community you’re building with your students. Michelle Sanchez, Boston Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 115B2. Teacher-Created Learning Activities to Support Instruction Across the Elementary CurriculumToday’s elementary school classrooms are active, inclusive settings comprised of students across the learning spectrum. It is rare that two students have the same learning style, let alone a classroom of twenty diverse learners! In this session, we will share learning center activities that you can incorporate into your classrooms. We will also demonstrate how to use learning activities to extend or assist students' learning for a specific math or language arts skill (e.g. compound words, vowel teams, telling time, fractions). In addition, we will share practical tips for managing learning centers without losing your sanity! K-3 teachers with an open mind and a love for hands-on experiential learning are encouraged to attend.Peg Daley & Lori Winer, Southborough Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 117B3. Book Club for Kids: Guided Reading K-2 Within the first months of school your goal is to get your guided reading groups up and running. This can be a challenge when you're assessing beginning of the year benchmarks while also surviving your first days with a class full of students you're getting to know. How can you plan reading groups that will support your routines and expectations while guiding students to become balanced readers? In this session we will cover the routines of implementing guided reading groups, ways to organize your data and progress to inform instruction, and discuss texts and a variety of activities that are best for your groups. We will also discuss what everyone else is doing while guided reading groups are meeting. Come to this session to get guided reading going!Amanda DeForest, Newton Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 135

Thursday, August 14, 2014Breakout Session C

9:00 - 10:20 A.M.

C1. Making Conferences Work for Both Families and Teachers Congratulations – you’ve made it through the few first months of school! You are planning exciting curriculum, getting to know your students, assessing student skills and developmental levels, and opening the lines of communication with families. Now, it is time for parent conferences. YIKES! For many new teachers, parent conference time may elicit feelings of uncertainty, stress, and anxiety. You may feel well prepared and excited to work with your students, but not so prepared and confident working with their parents and families. Believe it or not, many parents are having similar feelings about the upcoming meeting with their child’s teacher. This session will discuss your uncertainties and explore the expectations that parents have for these meetings. By understanding the point of view of both participants, parent-teacher conferences can be less stressful and more readily result in a cooperative, effective, and reciprocal relationship that benefits everyone.Karen Cristello, Boston College Children's CenterLocation: Fulton Hall 115C2. Lesson Planning using the Universal Design for Learning Framework Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a comprehensive framework rooted in research and theory, which provides teachers with enough guidance to support their planning for all learners as well as allows teachers the flexibility to plan and implement lessons using their own teacher expertise. UDL is composed of three large principles: representation, action and expression, and engagement. The UDL framework can be applied to everything you do in the classroom, increasing student access to content. This session will include an introduction to UDL followed by practice developing lesson plans that include components of UDL.Kavita Venkatesh, Boston CollegeLocation: Fulton Hall 117C3. Have Access to Technology in Your Classroom? Yay! Now What? What do you do as a new teacher when your principal expects you to use that new Smartboard or Promethean Board effectively in your lessons? How do you sort through all the great student resources online? Part of this session will help you learn some tips and tricks for using any interactive whiteboard as a teaching tool to engage your students and show you how to access interactive whiteboard lessons that have already been created. We will also share some of our favorite online resources for students that are FREE and easy to access whether you have a whiteboard or not. These online resources will make it simple for students to practice classroom skills as well as publish stories and other written work.Shelly Janowski & Rachel Rumely, Saint Columbkille Partnership SchoolLocation: Fulton Hall 135

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 2014BREAKOUT SESSION D

10:30 - 11:50 A.M.

D1. Classroom Management & Positive Support Strategies for the Beginning Teacher One of the most important skills any teacher can possess is effective classroom management. Without it, all potential learning is affected and students’ needs may not be met. Come to this session to obtain some great ideas to help you in your first few years of teaching. You will learn time saving tricks and good communication practices that will have you well on your way to running your classroom the way you want. We will discuss designing effective classroom management routines and interventions for an inclusive classroom environment. You get ideas that you will actually use for many years.David Stubbart, Southborough Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 115D2. Manageable Differentiated Instruction to Meet the Needs of ALL Your LearnersAfter spending days setting up your classroom, meeting your new students and your families, the real work begins. You assess each student and realize that each student has different needs. Some students need to review skills from the previous grade, some students are where your district expects them to be, and some are grade levels above. How in the world can you teach all of these kids what they need to know? (You are only one person after all!) In this session, we will walk you through what differentiated instruction is and why we have found so invaluable in our classrooms. We will share with you how we have organized our classrooms around this idea. We will even have some time for you to begin to plan out what differentiated instruction could look like in your room. Abigail Bannon & Melanie Guarrera, Newton Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 117D3. I Will Survive! Technology Tools to Make the Year Easier Wondering how you are going to manage as a new teacher? How will you keep track of student progress, student work, and communicate with parents all at the same time? Use technology to your advantage! This session will introduce you to helpful online resources and apps such as Edmodo, Confer, Three Ring, Google Forms and Drive, as well as suggestions for other websites and blogs to follow. In addition, iPads can be a teacher's best friend! Only have one iPad or just a few? Let us share with you how we use them daily in our classrooms in a variety of subjects. If you have access to an iPad or a tablet, you are encouraged to bring it with you. Don't have a portable device? Please come learn about new tools that may be available within your school community!Shelly Janowski & Rachel Rumely, Saint Columbkille Partnership SchoolLocation: Fulton Hall 135

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 2014BREAKOUT SESSION E

1:00 - 2:20 P.M.

E1.Classroom Management & Positive Support Strategies for the Beginning Teacher One of the most important skills any teacher can possess is effective classroom management. Without it, all potential learning is affected and students’ needs may not be met. Come to this session to obtain some great ideas to help you in your first few years of teaching. You will learn time saving tricks and good communication practices that will have you well on your way to running your classroom the way you want. We will discuss designing effective classroom management routines and interventions for an inclusive classroom environment. You get ideas that you will actually use for many years.David Stubbart, Southborough Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 115E2. Effective Lesson Planning for English Language Learners As a new teacher, you will be given a variety of curriculum materials for use in your classroom. But most boxed curriculum materials donâ€™t meet the needs of all students â€“ especially English language learners. This session will focus on effective ways to plan for English language learners and how to develop useful assessments embedded within instruction through brief lecture, group discussion, and practice with actual curriculum materials. The common core and the WIDA will be used to frame this presentation, ensuring practicality for your classrooms.Kavita Venkatesh, Boston CollegeLocation: Fulton Hall 135E3. Meeting the Needs of Everyone In the Inclusive ClassroomPicture this: Your classroom is beautifully organized, you have thought of everything. You have 20+ smiling faces standing with their smiling families. You have plans for the first few days of school ready to go: routines to teach, games to play, friendships to help create. Fast forward to October when the full academics hit. You realize that in your one classroom you have some drastic differences in need. You have students who need help with social pragmatics, students who need additional academic support, students who need individualized behavior plans, and students who need specialized instruction because they are only beginning to learn English. How can you make your instruction fit the needs of all of these kids? You have come to the right place! We are here to help you though it. We will be sharing strategies we use in our classrooms to help English Language Learners succeed from day one. We will be talking with you about ways you can incorporate some social pragmatic activities into your whole class and ways to use these strategies with specific students. We will talk about ways we accommodate work to meet the needs of our special education students and we will talk about different individual behavior plans that we have used with success. You will leave this session with a wealth of resources ready to use! Abigail Bannon & Melanie Guarrera, Newton Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 117

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 2014BREAKOUT SESSION F

2:30 - 3:50 P.M.

F1. Managing Classroom Chaos & Fostering Parent Participation: Your All-In-One Guide to Reigning in the Kids and Adults that Will Make (or Break) Your Year!How are you ever going to organize that classroom library? What kind of materials will be left for you from the previous teacher's debris? The answer is: not much. Come see some pictures and examples of basic classroom organization and learn some new ways to tidy up centers, manipulatives, and books without spending a small fortune on shelving and drawers. You will also receive key advice and tips on how to organize students at the beginning of the school year and throughout the coming months. You will also participate in a "Make and Take" experience - a chance for you to create something useful for your future classroom and to leave with a tool to start your year off with positive behavior management in mind. And, don't forget about those parents! Pesky, overzealous, or seemingly uninterested, it's your secondary job to create rapports with the adults in your students' lives. Come and get some fresh ideas to manage parent interest, lack there of, and everything in between!Vanessa O'Leary, Boston Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 135

F2. Teacher-Created Learning Activities to Support Instruction Across the Elementary CurriculumToday’s elementary school classrooms are active, inclusive settings comprised of students across the learning spectrum. It is rare that two students have the same learning style, let alone a classroom of twenty diverse learners! In this session, we will share learning center activities that you can incorporate into your classrooms. We will also demonstrate how to use learning activities to extend or assist students' learning for a specific math or language arts skill (e.g. compound words, vowel teams, telling time, fractions). In addition, we will share practical tips for managing learning centers without losing your sanity! K-3 teachers with an open mind and a love for hands-on experiential learning are encouraged to attend.Peg Daley & Lori Winer, Southborough Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 117F3. Using the C.A.F.E. System(Grades 3-6): Breaking the Mold of Guided Reading There have been a dozen different ways to teach reading over the decades, but you have not lived until you try the C.A.F.E. (Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding vocabulary) system by Boushey and Mosher. As a classroom teacher who has used the traditional guided reading model and been buried in book levels, the C.A.F.E. system is a breath of fresh air. You can empower students to choose all their own books, listen to others excitement about reading, and watch the brush fire catch as each learner finds his/her reading genre niche. Students thrive when they have choices, but you need to monitor them closely. The C.A.F.E. system has fundamentally changed my teaching practice and renewed my passion for helping children to enjoy reading, even the ones who say they hate it!. In this session, you will learn the basics and receive a TON of resources. Please join me to learn about a great system that uses all your current teaching skills and gives you more time to meet with your students.David Stubbart, Southborough Public SchoolsLocation: Fulton Hall 115